back from a weekend at Nundle.
Got there Friday night about 8pm just after they had a heavy rain storm pass through.
Set up the tent and had an early night. saturday after brekfast we headed out to the creek to set up the river sluice and try and figure out how to make it work.. My Mrs helped out for a while them left me too it.. She was more interested in finding gold them fiddle farting around with the sluice....I gave up after running about 5 buckets of clasified material...after doing a clean out and finding only a minute few speks for my trouble.. I went back to panning for the rest of the afternoon.
That evening back at camp we sat around the fire with a few of the other campers and a few too many cold onesevery one was swapping stories and one of the guys pulls out a small film canister full of fold .. He dropped a 1.4 grm nugget into my hand he and his mate had found up near an old mine shaft they had been working .. Norhing nicer then the heavy feeling of gold in your hand to motivate you.
one of the other couples said they would go out with us the next morning and help set up the sluice for us.
Sunday the four of us headed out to the same spot we were at Saturday and they tried to set up the sluice for me . My mrs was still happely panning away and getting colour in every pan, probably thinking I was wasting my time while she was getting results..
I ran about 10 x 5 gal buckets of clasified material theough the sluice and did a clean out , disappointingly with minimal results. The other couple who were running a diifferent type of sluice , were getting some good results with their sluice digging dirt from the same area both my wife and I were digging from.
I took a bit of time and just sat down and watch the sluice running, then made a few adjustments to the angle and the amount of water running over the riffles I did what I thought would improve the water flow and help clear the material a little better. . Then ran another 5 buckets of classified material. This time it looked like it was running better then before and after the clean out, I also had better results getting a few nice sizes peices and a lot of tinny specks.
All in all my wife probably panned about half the amount of dirt I ran through the sluice over the t.womdays and got a bit more colour then I did over the whole weekend weekend. Not disapointed with the results but keen to get out again and learn how to fine tune the sluice and work out an efficient system to dig, classify and wash the concentrate to get better results next time.
haven't weighed up our finds for the weekend but I'm guessing its not a great deal.
Still had a great weekend away, and looking forward to next time..
